3.3 KiB
Introduction
Grapevine is a Matrix homeserver that was originally forked from Conduit 0.7.0.
Goals
Our goal is to provide a robust and reliable Matrix homeserver implementation. In order to accomplish this, we aim to do the following:
- Optimize for maintainability
- Implement automated testing to ensure correctness
- Improve instrumentation to provide real-world data to aid decision-making
Non-goals
We also have some things we specifically want to avoid as we feel they inhibit our ability to accomplish our goals:
- macOS or Windows support
- These operating systems are very uncommon in the hobbyist server space, and we feel our effort is better spent elsewhere.
- Docker support
- Docker tends to generate a high volume of support requests that are solely due to Docker itself or how users are using Docker. In attempt to mitigate this, we will not provide first-party Docker images. Instead, we'd recommend avoiding Docker and either using our pre-built statically-linked binaries or building from source. However, if your deployment mechanism requires Docker, it should be straightforward to build your own Docker image.
- Configuration via environment variables
- Environment variables restrict the options for structuring configuration and
support for them would increase the maintenance burden. If your deployment
mechanism requires this, consider using an external tool like
envsubst.
- Environment variables restrict the options for structuring configuration and
support for them would increase the maintenance burden. If your deployment
mechanism requires this, consider using an external tool like
- Configuration compatibility with Conduit
- To provide a secure and ergonomic configuration experience, breaking changes are required. However, we do intend to provide a migration tool to ease migration; this feature is tracked here.
- Perfect database compatibility with Conduit
- The current database compatibility status can be tracked here. In the long run, it's inevitable that changes will be made to Conduit that we won't want to pull in, or that we need to make changes that Conduit won't want to pull in.
Project management
The project's current maintainers1 are:
| Matrix username | GitLab username |
|---|---|
@charles:computer.surgery |
charles |
@benjamin:computer.surgery |
benjamin |
@xiretza:xiretza.xyz |
Lambda |
We would like to expand this list in the future as social trust is built and technical competence is demonstrated by other contributors.
We require at least 1 approving code review from a maintainer2 before changes can be merged. This number may increase in the future as the list of maintainers grows.
Expectations management
This project is run and maintained entirely by volunteers who are doing their best. Additionally, due to our goals, the development of new features may be slower than alternatives. We find this to be an acceptable tradeoff considering the importance of the reliability of a project like this.